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Text Matters: a journal of literature, theory and culture

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Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, based at the University of Łódź, is an international and interdisciplinary journal, which seeks to engage in contemporary debates in the humanities by inviting contributions from literary and cultural studies intersecting with literary theory, gender studies, history, philosophy, and religion. The journal focuses on textual realities, but contributions related to art, music, film and media studies addressing the text are also invited. Submissions in English should relate to the key issues delineated in calls for articles which will be placed on the website in advance. The journal also features reviews of recently published books, and interviews with writers and scholars eminent in the areas addressed in Text Matters. Responses to the articles are more than welcome so as to make the journal a forum of lively academic debate which may also be extended to the internet forum. Though Text Matters derives its identity from a particular region, central Poland in its geographic position between western and eastern Europe, its intercontinental advisory board of associate editors and internationally renowned scholars makes it possible to connect diverse interpretative perspectives stemming from culturally specific locations.

Recent Submissions

In this paper I assess how Guy Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction criticizes the class-based and civil movements of post-1960s Saskatchewan through the recurring character of Ed. The protagonist of “Man Descending” and “Sam, ...

This paper examines self-fashioning in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything,” a story about a Sarajevo teenager’s journey through ex-Yugoslavia to the Slovenian town of Murska Sobota. His aim? “[T]o buy a freezer chest for my ...

Film is a powerful medium that can influence audience’s perceptions, values and ideals. As filmmaking evolved into a serious art form, it became a powerful tool for telling stories that require us to re-examine our ideology. ...

It was in the mid-twentieth century that the independent theatrical form based entirely on improvisation, known now as improvisational/improvised theatre, impro or improv, came into existence and took shape. Viola Spolin, ...

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at ...

This article explores the way in which surrealist techniques and assumptions underpin spatial representations in Ballard’s Concrete Island. With much of Ballard’s fiction using spatiality as an ideologically charged ...

In 2003, Martin Rees referred to the present as “mankind’s final century.” A few years later, Slavoj Žižek wrote that humankind is heading towards “apocalyptic zero-point,” when the ecological crisis will most probably ...

Don DeLillo’s White Noise depicts a world of rapid techno-scientific and economical changes. Paul Virilio’s concepts of dromology and speed, as well as his notions of accident and technology, seem to be the most relevant ...

The article discusses Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony with a focus on textual manifestations of the figure of the trickster. The theme of shape-shifting and transformation that one usually associates with tricksters is ...

In his pioneering study of Grande Dame Guignol (also referred to as hag horror or psycho-biddy), a female-centric 1960s subgenre of horror film, Peter Shelley explains that the grande dame, a stock character in this form ...

This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines, more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin ...

The following article analyzes two novels, published recently by a new, powerful voice in Irish fiction, Lisa McInerney: her critically acclaimed debut The Glorious Heresies (2015) and its continuation The Blood Miracles ...

The article explores the potential “healing” role performance art can have when representing disabling trauma, and engaging, as part of the creative process, participants who have experienced in their lives significant ...

In his early career, Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, emulated the style of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. By the 1960s he had established himself as a distinct voice in the hardboiled genre. In his ...

Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed ...

The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, ...

In this article I consider a certain characteristic of our times as a “secular age,” namely, a series of complications in our understanding of transgression. Transgression implies the presence of some rules and laws which ...